BOOK REVIEW

DREAM YOGA AND THE PRACTICE OF NATURAL LIGHT by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, edited and introduced by Michael Katz. New York: Snow Lion, 2002

Many Victorians viewed dreams as the "garbage of the mind." In stark contrast, the Surrealist movement, extending the work of Freud beyond its psychoanalytic bounds, sought to unite dreams and waking reality. Numerous traditional societies have similarly placed great stock in dreams, viewing them as both a symbolic language and a practice. And the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition encompasses this range of perspectives and then some, mastering them all with profoundly practical instructions on what we can do with these dramas in which we find ourselves while sleeping.

Like his other publicly available books of teachings, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche's Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light is a generous transformative reading experience, a resource that will unknot the thought of readers ready to engage it. Additionally (as seems to be the rule with such public works of his), for those who have received Rinpoche's living transmission, the volume can unlock the real essence of such transmission, reconciling the puzzle pieces of our day with the complete picture we embody from a larger perspective.

Rinpoche may surprise new readers early on with his assertion that dreamwork and lucid dreaming are not the true point of the book but rather secondary practices. The principal task he encourages us to master-and the reference point for everything else in the text-is the practice of natural light connected with the interval between falling asleep and dreaming. If we learn to integrate pure presence of awareness with sleep in this interval, that integration is the natural clear light. If one does this practice, lucid dreaming and dreams of clarity-i.e., visionary dreams, which must be distinguished from ordinary karmic dreams driven by experience (the garbage or leftovers of the mind)-will arise automatically. Rinpoche also discusses several ways in which dharma practices done while dreaming and those performed while awake (as well as teachings received in either state!) can support one another. On a related note, he explains in detail how doing both the principal and secondary practices also directly informs how we can relate to other intervals or bardosthroughout our lives and at the time of death. So the book's resources have a truly broad application.

The new edition is sufficiently different from the already pivotal previous version to warrant purchasing it and working seriously with its contents. When the first edition of Dream Yoga was released ten years ago, it assumed a unique niche in the existing literature on dreams and their significance. In the current edition, Rinpoche, who has had clear abilities in dream practices since his youth, expands his initial commentary on the "practice of the night" with more specific explanations drawn from an intimate and detailed Dzogchen manuscript he has been writing for many years (translated by Dr. James Valby). These explanations really address the full spectrum of concerns a Dzogchen practitioner may have-yet all from the orientation of dream practice.

Michael Katz's background as a psychologist, dedicated researcher in comparative ethnography on dreamwork in world cultures, and instructor of Yantra Yoga, enriched his notes and the narrative history that formed his introduction in the prior edition; it serves him equally well here in his further annotations to Rinpoche's text and incorporation of new material. His contribution is consistently complementary and unobtrusive. He has organized the sections of the present edition so that both newcomers to this material and those more familiar with tantric or Dzogchen approaches to dreamwork will be enriched from multiple perspectives. Readers are guided to distill their existing knowledge to its essence and expand in a variety of directions from this basis.

Some of the book's most remarkable new material consists of the exercises Rinpoche provides in training, transforming, dissolving, disordering, stabilizing, essentializing, holding and reversing dreams. Additional chapters of interest offer instructions for extending practice beyond the night into the day, as well as practices relating to cultivating the illusory body, clear light practices for developing contemplation, and teachings on the ph'owa or tranfer of consciousness at the time of death. A new chapter in which Rinpoche recounts some of his own dreams of clarity joins another strong chapter of this type from the first edition. This material rounds out the technical aspects of instruction with the lived dimension of these practices.

The new chapters are useful not in the sense of offering merely supplemental commentary, but really in the way they seem to capture the personal and conceptual nuances of Rinpoche's oral teaching style. They are intimate because they directly engage the reader with a bouquet of vocabulary and language atypical of general introductory books yet nonetheless accessible, as is the signature of Rinpoche's talks. For example, one reads: "When one is familiar with that state [the "clear light of clarity"], one experiences [that light] where manifestations of perceptual experience and mind arise unified in space beyond concept without interruption." Also, Rinpoche's personal narratives concerning his own dreams of clarity bring to the reader such a level of vividness, inspiration and humor that one cannot help but be encouraged to do these practices and know they are real and can bear fruit.

Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light is really a palimpsest or buffet of interrelated texts which prods us to examine the relationship between dreaming and waking states from several different angles. The inclusion of a lively interview with Norbu Rinpoche conducted by the editor, as well as a text on Dzogchen by the nineteenth century master Mipham, "The Buddha No Farther Than One's Palm," originally gave the book such a multi-layered quality; the new material described above serves to further this. All of Rinpoche's public works provide excellent overviews of Dzogchen; Dream Yoga does so with a visionary integrity that makes it both an immediate aid in dream practice and a specialized document of lasting historical authority and value.

by Jesse Abbot
Reprinted from The Mirror
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